An impressive example of the value of the discipline of starting the day with a period of listening for God’s guidance, and of asking instructions for the day, is that provided by the Iona Community of Scotland. This is the major discipline that holds all members of the Iona Fellowship together, wherever they may be. To a remarkable degree, their practice meets the test of social verification, since the way in which this small minority of disciplined men have penetrated the economic, educational, and religious life of their country is striking indeed. They are changing society because they have been changed.
Powerful and productive as individual silence may be, group silence may be even more productive. Many are able to report that a genuine entering into a group silence, when it is dynamic and not merely sleepy, can bring, in the briefest conceivable time, an entire flood of ideas not previously recognized. More than three hundred years ago, Robert Barclay, one of the acknowledged masters of the interior life, had such an experience that radically altered his succeeding career. “When I came into the silent assemblies of God’s people,” he reported, “I felt a secret power among them, which touched my heart, and as I gave way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me, and the good raised up, and so I became thus knit and united unto them, hungering more and more after the increase of this power and life, whereby I might feel myself perfectly redeemed.”

–Elton Trueblood, The New Man for Our Time